Apple's WebKit team helps launch Speedometer 2.0 browser benchmark

In partnership with Chromium, Apple's WebKit team has released Speedometer 2.0, an updated benchmark for developers testing the performance of browser engines.

The new test, run as a Web app, "better reflects the frameworks, tools, and patterns in wide use today," the WebKit team said. One of the primary changes is support for later JavaScript libraries and frameworks, such as React, Preact, Inferno, Vue.js, and the latest version of Ember.

Among other supported JavaScript changes are ES2015/ES6 —including a version using ES Modules and Babel-generated ES5 output —plus TypeScript, including a version of Angular transpiled to ES5.

The benchmark also supports technologies like Elm and PureScript, which can be transpiled to JavaScript, and a new scoring system for responsiveness that calculates the arithmetic mean of the geometric means run for each iteration of the benchmark.

WebKit is the open-source rendering engine underlying Safari, Apple's Mac and iOS Web browser. The technology was also once central to Google's multi-platform Chrome browser, but that software diverged in 2013 with a new layout engine known as Blink, only holding on to WebKit's WebCore components.